Memories of Atlanta come flooding back

The terrible bombing in Boston this week took me back to an eerily similar incident a decade and a half ago where I happened to be on the front lines: the 1996 bombing at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta during the Olympics.

My wife and I had been flown out by a client to spend three days at the Games, and we were staying at the hotel at CNN Center, right next to the park. It was our first trip away from home since we had had our first son, Justin, who at the time was 8 months old. We left him with his grandmommy and took off for what until the bombing was an incredibly enjoyable mini-vacation, highlighted by sitting right behind Dennis Hopper — one of my favorite actors — during a swim match.

Our last night in town, we took a pleasant walk through the park at night, enjoying a concert by Jack Mack and the Heart Attack and then stopped for a drink at the hotel bar. We got back to our room just before 2 a.m. and I sat in a chair by the window, nursing a final drink I had brought back with me.

Then the earth shook. Unbeknownst to me at the time, a man named Eric Robert Rudolph had planted a green U.S. military field pack containing three pipe bombs surrounded by nails under a bench near a concert sound tower. When the bomb went off, much like Boston, nails and shrapnel went flying. A woman was killed in the explosion when a nail penetrated her skull. Another 111 people were wounded.

I didn’t know all that when I ran out the door to the elevator, determined to go outside and see what was going on. The elevator stopped at my floor and the Dream Team spilled out, led by a clearly shaken Shaquille O’Neal, who tearfully told his friends, “Let’s take the stairs. We don’t know what’s going on.”

I went with them, and then ran past them out the front doors of the hotel toward the park. Smoke was drifting my way; I heard sirens and lots of flashing lights. As I made my way through the park, I began to realize something truly terrible had happened, and the sight of a young woman running past me, coming from the opposite direction, blood streaming down her face, made me stop. More wounded began coming toward me from the park center, but before I could do anything police swarmed in and through loudspeakers told all of us to clear the area, and that it wasn’t safe.

I walked back to my hotel. My wife’s face was ashen. She had turned on the TV, and was almost in a state of shock from the televised bedlam. We lay on the bed, glued to the news, until we fell asleep.

The next morning, the entire area, hotel included, had been cordoned off. A little cart took us and our bags outside the “crime scene,” where we took a shuttle to the airport.